The Congressional Democrats don’t like the choices you’ve been making lately, so they’ve done something about it. It seems that a lot of you student loan borrowers have taken advantage of student loan consolidations, interest rate reductions, and fee waivers offered by FFELP lenders, and Senator Kennedy and Co., don’t really appreciate that.

Congress’ new plan to reform student loans will do away with loan consolidations, interest rate reductions and fee waivers.You won’t have the FFELP’s professional customer service, borrower education programs, loan repayment assistance, forbearance, extensions, extended repayment terms and sometimes – outright loan forgiveness. FFELP lenders won’t be competing for your loan business, so you won’t be getting better interest rates. You didn’t mean to choose those as a better deal over the Federal loan program, did you?

Under Congress’ plan, you’ll still have choices to make. You may still get to choose your lender; there just won’t be quite as many lenders to choose from. Most FFELP lenders can’t break even under Congress’ new plan, so they won’t participate. That’s good because that will narrow down your choices quickly. You’ll have a choice of two lenders per state. Two. That’s choice, right? One or the other? Technically, it’s choice.

Actually, there’s a good possibility that your state won’t have two lenders that want to write student loans anymore. You might only have a choice of one lender. That’s still choice, because you could choose not to borrow money to get through college. Technically, you still have a choice when there’s only one lender in your state.

There is also the possibility that all lenders in your state won’t want to write student loans anymore, so Ed will assign you a lender of last resort. I know that doesn’t sound like much of a choice, but you could choose not to go to college. That’s still choice, right? You freely choose not to go to college because you can’t afford to go. You’ve made a fiscally responsible choice to forego college on the basis of affordability.

Without student loan consolidations, you may have as many as three lenders you’ll be making payments to if you pursue an undergraduate degree. You may have four, five or even six lenders if you go on to earn a professional degree. That’s another example of the choice under this program. Who are you going to pay this month? If you’ve got a half-dozen loans to keep track of, and you can’t get discounts on any of them, and you can’t consolidate to get a single payment, you might actually have to choose which bills you pay in any given month.

Tell your Congressional representatives to restore your choice in lending. Tell them you would prefer the choice you have under the FFELP program, and you don’t’ want to get stuck in a program that doesn’t provide you with the opportunity to make the best choice for your particular situation.